All about the African Safaris that you thought you could not afford

New Post from The Kenya Chronicles:

As many years as I have been teaching African and African American history I have to confess that I did not know until recently that safaris come in all sizes and a variety of packages. These excursions to observe the animals of Africa in their natural environments are not at all exclusively for the rich.

This fact says so much about how the media shapes our perceptions. A few weeks ago, everyone to whom I mentioned that we were going to Kenya asked if we would be going on a safari.  What followed was often a conversation about the exorbitant costs of safaris.

Now I am in Kenya only to find out that thanks to a progressive government policy, there are national parks that everyone from schoolchildren to foreigners can access at an affordable cost. In fact, it is clear that Kenya as a part of their school curriculum regularly expose their young to these parks on field trips.  There seems to have been a longstanding commitment to encouraging young people to be good stewards of this incredible wildlife heritage.

I was happy to find out that one can enter a National Park for about $80 and stay overnight at a campsite from as little as $20.  (For comparison, Disneyland is about $90 a day.) Hotel prices also vary from the low end to the high.

The greatest challenge is the airfare, but these days, good old fashioned competition is driving down prices.  Many airlines fly there including Kenya Airways, Ethiopian Airways, British Airways, KLM, Qatar Airways and others.

So how do we explain the persistent perception that this is an experience primarily for the rich?

The reality is that Kenya became an independent nation in 1963 (having been colonized by the British) and many of these parks were set up only a few short years after.  Lake Nakuru National Park, for example, was set up only 4 years later at the height of independence fervor.

The good news is that the safaris of Kenya are accessible and affordable.  May many from around the world come and discover all they have to offer.

Here’s a peek of what you will see when you come.

Photos at Lake Nakuru by Mickias Bailey, All rights reserved.

mickias.bailey@gmail.com

Anne C. Bailey
Author of The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave auction in American History.
(Cambridge Univ Press, 2018)

The Kenya Chronicles and Travel Channel Appearance July 19

Today marks the beginning of The Kenya Chronicles—intermittent news and articles about the country of Kenya.  I am here on the African continent for three weeks having been invited by a local university to give a talk about the highs and lows of publishing works of history.  I was happy to to interface with their faculty and students and to donate copies of my books to their library.  It’s been a great time!

Beyond the university, I have been on somewhat of an adventure – from one day safaris to roaming around the Old Town of the coastal town of Mombasa.  I have even been to a church service in Swahili!   I am weaving in and out of the hustle and bustle of big city Nairobi while at the same time enjoying the lush countryside – particularly the farms with rows and rows of tea bushes and coffee trees. Kenya is number 2 in terms of exportation of coffee so this really is the place to be if you love coffee and tea.  Taking tea all day is  growing on me. The scent, the taste, the diversity of the tea offerings are nothing short of amazing. A lot of things are impressive here, but perhaps chief of all is the importance of family as we have been warmly embraced by families here as we move from town to country and country to town.

So there is much to say about this incredible country but for today, I share just a few pictures to whet your appetite for the other upcoming segments of The Kenya Chronicles.

Windrush Update

29 June 2018

The Joint Committee on Human Rights of the UK Parliament has  published Windrush generation detention report.

The Home Office provided ‘no credible explanation’ as to why two children of the Windrush generation, Paulette Wilson and Anthony Bryan, were wrongfully locked up twice, depriving them of their human right to liberty, according to a report by the Joint Committee on Human Rights published today.

The Committee, made up of MPs and Peers Chaired by Harriet Harman MP, took evidence in person from Ms Wilson and Mr Bryan, (who have been settled in the UK since childhood) and examined their Home Office cases files. From the outset, the files contained all the evidence that showed that the Home Office had no right to detain them. But the Home Office still wrongly detained them, twice. The analyses of the two case files are set out as appendices to the report.

In evidence to the Committee, the Home Secretary said that he was sorry for what had happened. A senior official from the Home Office called the handling of these cases a ‘mistake’ but could give the Committee no account of any action that had been taken at the department to address the very serious shortcomings in these cases.

For more see link below:

https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/joint-select/human-rights-committee/news-parliament-2017/windrush-report-publication17-19/

Other articles by the BBC

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-44807801

Travel Channel Appearance this coming Thursday, July 19

I am appearing on another episode of The Travel Channel’s Mysteries at the Museum series this Thursday at 9pm EST.

Should be fun. Check it out if you can.

People over Profit

Edna Dean Proctor (1829-1923) was a poet originally from Henniker, NH.  She lived in Brooklyn, NY for 30 years but was buried in Framingham where a bridge is named in her honor. Here, she writes about The Weeping Time auction of 1859 –the story I tell in my book of the same name.  Thanks to reader LF for bringing this poem to my attention.  Her poem, “The Slave Sale,” was published in 1866.

The Slave Sale

by Edna Dean Proctor

Who would not be in Savannah to-day?

Out by the Race-course, — there is the Play, —

Tragedies, comedies, all together

Shaking hands in the wild March weather.

There are hundreds of actors, the programmes tell,

And some, at each scene are to say farewell;

Trust me, 't will be a marvellous Play,

For this is Pierce Butler's " Benefit " day.

Mark them. See with what eager eyes

They watch and wait till the curtain rise:

Some from the rice-fields broad and green

That stretch the swamp and the shore between;

And some from St. Simon's Isle, that lies

A league away where the land-breeze dies, —

St. Simon's Isle where the sea-wave flows,

And the fairest and finest cotton grows.

Parents and children, every one,

Have toiled for others since life begun;

But then each man at his cabin door

Could sit in peace when his work was o'er,

And the same roof covered them all, though slaves,

And the same moon rose on their fathers' graves,

And they laughed and sung and hoped to rest

One day in the soil which their young feet prest.

What does it mean that they tremble here,

Waiting the call of the auctioneer?

What does it mean! 'T is a common tale, —

Their master's funds were about to fail;

Mister Pierce Butler has debts to pay,

And this, good friends, is the only way.

Generous souls! For his lordly sake

They ought to be willing their hearts should break.

And rejoice to be anywhere, anyhow sold,

To fill his coffers with needful gold!

For what is the grief of such as these

Compared to a gentleman's moneyed ease?

And then, when the little arrangement's made.

And he feels quite sure 't was a gaining trade,

He 'll give them a dollar! — that will heal

Every sorrow a slave can feel.

Scores for the master and one for his tool, —

Thus he 'll follow the Golden Rule

That reads, " To others I 'll do what I see

Will bring the most money to mine and me. "

Eleven o'clock and the sale begins, —

Now the best man is the man who wins

Hand and brain at the lowest price

For his fields of cotton and cane and rice.

Buyers are there from the far Southwest

To the Georgian isles on the ocean's breast,

And from Florida jungles, gay with vines,

North to the woods of the Carolines;

And higher and higher the bidding goes,

And wilder, without, the March wind blows,

As one and another, faint with fear,

Are led to the block their doom to hear.

There is Elisha with children and wife,

O how anxiously watching the strife!

A mild-faced man in the crowd they spy, —

Can he not, will he not all of them buy?

And he weeps and pleads, but the man denies,

For he sees where a closer bargain lies,

And their courage sinks and their tears come fast;

But what of this? When the sale is past

They 'll have a dollar! and that will heal

Every sorrow a slave can feel.

Scores for the master and one for his tool, —

Thus is followed the Golden Rule

That reads, " To others I 'll do what I see

Will bring the most money to mine and me. "

The wind blew strong and the rain was cold,

And Daphney's babe was but two weeks old,

And to shield them both from the driving storm

A shawl is over her trembling form:

" Off with it! " " What is the matter? " they shout,

And the jest and the oath are passed about

Till she droops and shivers and wonders why

It was not hers and her child's to die.

But what of this? When the sale is done,

And the papers are signed and the profits won,

She 'll have a dollar! and that will heal

Every sorrow a slave can feel.

Scores for the master and one for his tool, —

Thus is followed the Golden Rule

That reads, " To others I 'll do what I see

Will bring the most money to mine and me. "

Jeffrey has neither father nor mother,

But Jeffrey and Dorcas love each other

With a love that never can change or fail,

And he tells his master the simple tale,

And begs him to buy her with earnest tone, —

But Dorcas cannot be sold alone;

He goes to the swamp-lands, drearily parted,

And she to the cotton-fields, broken-hearted!

But what of this? 'T is a trifling thing;

Did they not excellent prices bring?

Give them a dollar! — that will heal

Every sorrow a slave can feel.

Scores for the master and one for his tool, —

Thus is followed the Golden Rule

That reads, " To others I 'll do what I see

Will bring the most money to mine and me. "

Sadly they follow them, one and all,

Till none are left in the farthest stall.

The Play is over; the farewells said;

The curtain dropped and the actors fled;

And the stars shine out, and the breeze goes by,

Sweet with the bloom of the fruit-trees nigh.

A hundred cabins are dark and still,

And the wind and the moonlight may work their will,

For those who sat by the open door

Will never return to their shelter more,

Nor dance on the lawn when day is past,

Nor sleep by their fathers' graves at last.

But this is nothing; their master paid

For all the ruin and wreck he made;

Each had a dollar! and that will heal

Every sorrow a slave can feel.

Scores for the master and one for his tool, —

Thus he followed the Golden Rule

That reads, " To others I 'll do what I see

Will bring the most money to mine and me. "

God of the Weak and the Poor! how long

Shall their cries be drowned in the victor's song,

And body and brain and heart be sold

For the white man's ease and the white man's gold?

Hast Thou not heard them? Dost Thou not say

There shall come, at the last, a grander Play,

When Thy searching eye shall the actors see,

And Love the coin of the realm shall be?

Woe to those who 've but gold that day

When vengeance is Thine, and Thou wilt repay!

https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/slave-sale

Family Separation update…

Many parents at the border are still desperately waiting to be reunited with their children.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/separated-parents-too-grief-stricken-to-seek-asylum-experts-say_us_5b379974e4b08c3a8f6ad5d9

BAILEYBLOG’s New look coming soon

I hope you will like the new look of Baileyblog which is now attached to my website.  I also hope you will continue to share it with friends. For those new to the blog, please JOIN the Baileyblog community by adding your email to the right.  We are also interested in contributors to the blog so if you have an interest in history and memory, let us know. You can reach us at freedomlives4@yahoo.com  We publish weekly.  As always, your comments are very welcome.

Thanks so much for your support!

Anne Bailey

FAMILY REUNIFICATIONS HERE AND ABROAD

                                                                                                                         June 26, 2018

“Don’t separate us. Don’t let us in, but don’t rip us apart.”  So said Arnovis Guidos Portillo who was deported to El Salvador without his 6 year old daughter, Meybellin, who he has not seen in 26 days.

In light of the need to urgently reunite these families, should we consider something akin to the milk carton missing kids campaign?  You may remember that ingenious way in which law enforcement attempted to find missing kids by putting their pictures on milk cartons?

Might it be a good idea to video each child and have their faces on a continuing loop on a dedicated TV channel so that their parents could watch, see and identify their children?

WINDRUSH UPDATE

In a previous post, I said the following:

In the last few years, since about 2013, the British government has been carrying out an immigration policy which is at odds with its colonial past.  British officials have been quietly deporting or denying benefits to long term residents referred to as the Windrush generation –Caribbean migrants who came to Britain in the mid 20^th century to help rebuild post war Britain, to study or to find employment.  They were called the Windrush generation because many arrived on the SS Empire Windrush in 1948.The citizenship of these British residents until these last few years had never been questioned. They worked.  They bought homes. They raised families. They paid their taxes. They received their benefits and most importantly, they contributed much to British society. Then without warning, a new immigration policy required them to produce citizenship papers. 

Though this policy has been publicly disavowed, many of these cases are still to be resolved. At the same time, the British government announced last week that they would fund annual celebrations for a national Windrush Day “to recognise and honour the enormous contribution of those who arrived between 1948-71.”  Friday, June 23 was, in fact, the anniversary.

Celebrations and commemorations are important--especially in the Caribbean where Professor Hilary Robertson Hickling of the University of West Indies and the National Library of Jamaica have mounted an exhibit on the Windrush migrants.

Thanks too to The Guardian newspaper and writers like Emma Caroline Lewis of Global Voices and Petchary's Blog for highlighting their contributions and keeping this story in the news.

Now in this new royal era, we await the resolution of all the Windrush cases--the restoration of all their rights as British citizens and the reunification of their families.

Arnovis Guidos Portillo holds up a photo of his daughter, Meybelin, who was separated from him in late May after he asked for asylum.

(Fred Ramos / For The Washington Post)

Anne C. Bailey

Author of The Weeping Time: Memory of the Largest Slave Auction in American History(Cambridge University Press, 2017)

Keeping Families Together: Who we are vs. Who we were

                                                                                                                                     June 16, 2018

On May 29, Dora * was pulled over by the police in a routine traffic stop in Albany, New York. Never did she imagine that in spite of the fact that she has a valid work permit, no criminal record and is a law abiding taxpayer that she would that evening be sent to jail.  Furthermore, she would be separated from her two children who had traveling with her in the car.

Her immigration status was “pending” and she regularly reported to an immigration office in Buffalo. Maybe it was her accent or the fact that she recently missed one appointment, the policeman called ICE (the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and they sent her to the county jail first, then to a detention center.

For 48 hours, she could not make contact with anyone –not her mother, not a lawyer, no one.  Her mother, Mary*, who is advocating for her says: “They can ship you anywhere they want because it is federal (jurisdiction);  You have no access to your relatives.”

And in fact, her daughter, Dora, was not allowed phone calls for the first three days of her detention.  Fortunately, she had been able to call an aunt who came and picked up her kids, but they too had no contact with their mother for several days since the beginning of this incident.  Their grandmother is now doing everything she can to unify this family.  I said it before in a previous post," #Where are the children", and I will say it again.

This is not who we are.

I am a US citizen and have been for many years. I am also an immigrant.  I came to New York City from Jamaica when I was 12 with my mother and my sixteen year old brother.   We came here at a time when things were very difficult in Jamaica. Many people were leaving, not necessarily because they wanted to, but because things were very difficult politically and economically too. We came legally and stayed here legally though our status was for many years “in progress” as my mother’s place of employment was our sponsor.

I remember our first days here.  I was wide-eyed at this place called New York City. The big buildings, the bright lights, the hustle and bustle on the streets- a far cry from my native Jamaica yet fascinating in a different way. I remember I hadn’t wanted to leave Jamaica. I had just completed my first year of secondary school and was looking forward to the next.  That next year, however, would be spent first with extended family, then second with our sponsor in these unfamiliar surroundings.

The one thing that kept me going was my family.  My mother and brother were “home,” and so I could reason that I hadn’t really left home. I brought home with me.  It is in this context that I cannot imagine what it would have been like to have been separated from the only two people who made a big city less daunting. 

Thankfully, I did not have to imagine such things because up until a few weeks ago, the policy regarding immigrants was always to keep families together.  Immigration was a civil matter, not a criminal one.  Previously, families who crossed the border seeking asylum, for example, were allowed to stay together in shelters until final decisions were made regarding their status.

That does not mean that the system is not broken. That does not mean that urgent change is not needed. Certainly, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have been talking about this for a long time, but sadly, it has been mostly talk.  Immigration reform has not happened.

In that void has arisen these knee jerk reactions which have led us to family separations – whether it is DACA kids who were brought here by their parents as children, those fleeing violence and seeking asylum at the border or even those immigrants who have legal rights to be here but are wading through the process like Dora.

As a citizen, I am proud of the fact that in the face of an often confusing and burdensome situation, prior administrations, both Democrat and Republican, did their best NOT to separate children from their parents.  They worked towards the most humane solutions, albeit stop -gap solutions.

As a result, children and families were not traumatized.  Those who developed previous policies remembered that as a country we have championed human rights abroad and thus have drawn lines in the sand regarding certain actions.

Because that is NOT who we are.

It may have been who we were as I shared in my book, The Weeping Time, which documented the harsh and devastating reality of antebellum slave auctions, but it is not who we are now and that is what matters.  I truly believe that one day America could be remembered not so much for its computers or its robots or its driverless cars, but for its commitment to human rights. It is our choice.

Dora and her two children deserve to stay together.  Whatever is decided about their future, it is a future which they must be allowed to face together.   That is the only humane thing to do from any standpoint, but particularly from the standpoint of a nation that has longed prided itself as a champion of human rights.

*Actual names are not used but if anyone is in a position to help this family, please send me an email at freedomlives4@yahoo.com

Anne C. Bailey

Author of The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History (Cambridge University Press, 2017)

Photo by Fabian Fauth on Unsplash

Please SHARE with your followers and JOIN the blog to the right.

Room with a Beautiful VIEW

In a divided country and in a divided world, I encountered an oasis this week. I had the pleasure of being in the studio audience of the daytime television program, The View.  The View, created by journalist Barbara Walters in 1997, is a TV program which brings together female co-hosts of different ages and backgrounds to discuss issues of the day.

Fresh off her moving and insightful commencement speech at her alma mater, Binghamton University, co-host, Sunny Hostin, invited me to watch a taping of the show.  In her speech a couple weeks ago, she said many memorable things, but one thing stood out the most.   Through her experience with The View, she shared that she has a fresh new perspective on listening to various points of view.  She has also learned to treasure the relationships that she has with these women even when they fundamentally disagree. It was a challenge for her, and as I listened, a challenge for me too.

Sitting in that audience this week, I could see exactly what she meant, and in fact, saw more than that.  What these women are doing every day is exactly what this country needs right now.  Led by the indomitable Whoopi Goldberg, these women—Sunny Hostin, Megan McCain, Joy Behar and Sara Haines---debated everything from whether it was appropriate for a teacher to have called a student a class clown to whether President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky in the White House set an awful precedent.  All of the women had strong views on each topic. Furthermore, no one seemed fearful to express themselves. At the same time, they did not have to agree.  The only thing they needed to agree on was HOW they would speak to each other, which was, in a word, respectfully.

I came away impressed with the fact that they have created a space in which people can speak openly yet with civility at a time when there seems to be very few public spaces like this.  If anything, there is pressure to think one way or another and precious little attempt at listening to others.

At the same time, it is clear that these women have dearly held beliefs.  This is not an exercise in cultural or moral relativism; not at all.  The View, however,  does model for us a public space in which views can be shared and heard without recrimination, name calling and the like.  I particularly like the fact that when these women occasionally err and do not follow their own dictum,(as would anyone) they are brave enough to apologize publicly.  We don't see much of that these days.

Finally, it is apparent that they all have various pet projects or areas in which they serve the public, but in my mind, what they do every day is a public service.  Modeling how we can be a diverse community and create community at the same time is a public service.     

We need this right now.  We need these voices right now. We need this room with a view.

with Whoopi Goldberg

Co-host Sunny Hostin, friends and fellow audience members,  Michele Meyer-Shipp and mom Pat.
photos courtesy of Michele Meyer-Shipp

Puerto Rico update

Since I last wrote about Puerto Rico and the devastation after Hurricane Maria, many have been concerned about the inattention to what the American citizens in Puerto Rico are facing on the ground.  A Harvard University study estimates that thousands have died because of the hurricane.  As such, there has been much more devastation than has been previously reported.

“4,645 deaths can be linked to the hurricane and its immediate aftermath, making the storm far deadlier than previously thought. Official estimates have placed the number of dead at 64, a count that has drawn sharp criticism from experts and local residents and spurred the government to order an independent review that has yet to be completed.”

Many of these deaths occurred due to lack of emergency services or medical attention for those in regions most affected by Hurricane Maria. Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans are resilient, but this situation still needs urgent attention.

Anne C. Bailey

PLEASE JOIN the blog with adding your email to the right.

#Where are the Children: The Weeping Time Then and Now

Photo by Andrea Ricketts on unsplash.com

My book, The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave auction in American History, (Cambridge University Press, 2017) opens with the story of an engaged couple separated from each other on the auction block.  On March 2 and 3, 1859,  Pierce Mease Butler of the Butler Plantation estates in the Georgia Sea Islands sold 436 men, women, and children, including 30 babies, to buyers and speculators from New York to Louisiana.

Slave auctions were long a part of the fabric of American life, but on the eve of the Civil War, this unprecedented sale was noteworthy not only for its size, but because of the fact that the Gullah Geechee slaves of Butler Island, Georgia, had generally not been sold on the open market. They were a tight-knit community with norms, values and customs that were greatly influenced by their West and Central African heritage.

This past year, when I have given presentations on my book, I often begin by reading the words of the 23-year-old cotton hand, Jeffrey, to his new owner begging him to purchase his love, Dorcas, chattel number 278:

I loves Dorcas, young Mas’r; I loves her well an’ true; she says she loves me, and I know she does; de good Lord knows I love her better than I loves any one in de wide world – never can love another woman half as well.  Please buy Dorcas, Mas’r.  We’re be good sarvants to you long as we live. We’re be married right soon, young Mas’r, and de chillum will be healthy and strong, Mas’r and dey’ll be good sarvants, too. Please buy Dorcas, youn Mas’r. We loves each other a heap—do really true, Mas’r…

Every single time, it is heart wrenching to read those words.  Every single time, I have to take a minute before I get back to presenting on the book. It is never lost on me the human cost of slavery. It is never lost on me the trauma that families endured. 

I always begin that way not to be sensational but to objectively capture what slavery really entailed because the raw emotion of such routine separations was that horrible and was that dreadful; of that there can be no doubt. There is no getting around it.  What else would one feel when separated from a loved one?

Thankfully, in this auction that I have spent 10 years studying, though there were no cases of young children separated from their parents, it was it no less heart wrenching. Furthermore, we know that this did indeed happen quite routinely in the period of slavery.

Listen to some of those voices here.

From Kate Drumgoold, enslaved child whose mother was sold on the eve of the Civil War:

My mother was sold at Richmond, Virginia and a gentleman bought her who lived in Georgia and we did not know she was sold until she was gone; and the saddest thought to me was to know which way she was gone, and I used to go outside and look up to see if there was anything that would direct me, and I saw a clear place in the sky, and it seemed to me the way she had gone, and I watched it three and a half years, not knowing what that meant, and it was there the whole time mother was gone.

And from the ex -slave and renown statesman, Frederick Douglass:

My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant.  It is a common custom in the part of Maryland from which I ran away, to part children from their mothers at a very early age.  

I have always felt that the legacy of slavery had a great impact on the present, but I have often argued that we may see certain patterns or themes reminiscent of the past but no straight line.  I never expected to draw a straight line between anything that America did then and what it does now, yet the voices of immigrant mothers tell another story.

Here below is an affidavit of an immigrant mother seeking asylum at the border being separated from her child:

My son was crying as I put him in the seat.  I did not even have a chance to try to comfort my son, because the officers slammed the door shut as soon as he was in his seat.  I was crying too. I cry even now when I think about that moment when the border officers took my son away.

This is a scene in the modern day of a child being ripped from the arms of their parent. It does not belong here in a country which has long since progressed to a new understanding of civil rights and human rights; a country that has, in fact, led the world in the development of such rights.

For those of us who love this place, who call this place home, (no matter where we were born,) I pray we will stand up and advocate for these families.  I pray we will stand up for the best that this country represents, not the worst.

For as I show in my work, alongside the devastation of the auction block, there was also the Underground Railroad. Alongside the slave master or the overseer, there was the abolitionist.  It is not today that these opposing forces have been in conflict; it is not a new thing, but on Emancipation Day, January 1, 1865 to be exact—a new day literally dawned. 

America started out on a new journey – the journey to reconcile the high ideals set out in The Declaration of Independence and in The Constitution with its reality on the ground. It set out on a journey that led to the passing of the 13^th Amendment which officially ended slavery and gave citizenship to African Americans who had been enslaved. This new journey was to have many fits and starts, but the 1950’s and 60’s Civil rights movement gave it new life and extended that life and these rights to many others who had also been excluded: Jews, Asians, Latinos, women, immigrants from non-European countries and the like.

That journey brings us to today. We can’t go back. 

Some of us, perhaps soon more of us, will agree again with that incomparable document, The Declaration of Independence: “All men are created equal and they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”

And those rights include the right to not be forcibly separated from their children.

Anne C. Bailey

Mother and child separation in slavery

Please SHARE this article with your followers and for other articles like these, please JOIN the blog by inserting your email to the right.  Once a week, these articles will come to your inbox.

The Caribbean Windrush Generation, Colonialism and the Idea of Home

            I was born in Jamaica, a former colony of Great Britain. When I was growing up, I did not really understand what that meant.  I knew only that we spoke English and Jamaican patois but English was the official language. I knew too that we learned a lot about British history  in and out of school.  I knew we celebrated British holidays like Boxing Day – the day I was born.  Boxing day is the day after Christmas which was traditionally celebrated like a second Christmas day, particularly for household staff in England who had to work on the day itself.   

Growing up in Jamaica, I had no knowledge of the the specifics of this history and I suspect it was the same for many around me. We just knew that Boxing day was a holiday and it meant additional time with family since all places of business were closed.   These things were just traditional and they spoke to us of home.  Likewise, we ate elaborately decorated buns at Easter and rich wine soaked fruit cake at Christmas—again because that is what the British used to do and that is legacy they left; that is the legacy we kept.  That too spoke to us of home.

So when hundreds of Caribbean residents embarked the MV Empire Windrush on May 28 1948, they got on that ship as British subjects—as knowledgeable about Britain as anyone who lived in the “mother country." Some of them had even fought alongside Britons in World War II.  Certainly, they had literally learned more about Britain than they had about Jamaica or Africa or anywhere else for that matter.   Noted African author, Ngugi wa Thiong'o in his memoir, In the House of the  Interpreter, writes eloquently about that phenomenon. As another person with a British colonial legacy, in his case, Kenya, he wrote about going to an elite school called Alliance where he learned much about Britain but very little about his place of birth.

And so for these and other reasons, Britain was not an unfamiliar place for these African descended Jamaicans and other Caribbean peoples.  They were not strangers.  So much of their lives had been influenced by England that it might only have been the weather that was unfamiliar.

But they forged on.  They built a life there and called Britain home in a new way. They became nurses, bus drivers, railroad engineers. Others laid railroad tracks, and still others took care of the elderly.  They bought homes and settled down. Yet now, since a new policy was put in place in 2013, this Windrush generation, many of whom are now seniors, have been asked to leave. They have been asked to pack their bags and find another home because Britain –the Britain that they helped to rebuild after the ravages of war – is no longer to be their home.

Reportedly, this situation is now to be resolved but when?   And what about those who are already in Barbados and Jamaica  in a kind of no man’s land of citizenship? Will their situation also be sorted out?  Will they be able to come back to Britain as citizens if they choose or go back and forth as they please?

Who will compensate them not only financially but emotionally for that sense of being ripped from their home because of new and more pressing political agendas?  Even if and when all is rectified, will they ever feel again like they are truly home?  To be clear, up until recently, for a number of Caribbean descended nationals, returning to the Caribbean was a goal -- but it was their choice to return to the Caribbean, not because they were being deported.

These are the questions I am asking as I think about the idea of home and what the legacy of colonialism really means; how that legacy disrupts ideas of home in the past and as it turns out, also in the present.

But the good news is that it is not too late to make things right.  The  British Home Secretary apologized and promised on March 30 that the policy would be overturned and that amends would be made in two weeks.  I was very glad to hear about this commitment and hope that indeed all benefits of citizenship will be restored to every one of these British citizens.  As of  this writing, many are still waiting for the promised change.  I remain hopeful, however, that the office of the British Home Secretary will honor their word. 

A little universal thing called home.  It truly matters.  May Britain in this new era also remember its history, and in so doing, set an example for the world.

Easter Bun and Christmas cake, Jamaican holiday traditions

http://www.sams247.com/jamaican-recipes_jamaican-easter-bun-recipe.aspx
By Mrudit161187 [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons


Anne C. Bailey
Author of The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History.(Cambridge University Press, 2017)

Selected Sources:
Articles by Sarah Marsh, Amelia Gentleman and Josh Halliday of The Guardian.